I am leaving the Environment Agency (and therefore Defra group) after 19 years soon. I took the opportunity a few weeks ago, when talking at Loughborough University, to write a career retrospective looking at the common theme of change.

1. Breaking Silos with Data and
Post It ® Notes
@MrMikeRose
I’m Mike Rose
My background is that I have a degree in Oceanography and Physical Geography
from Southampton and an LLM in Intellectual Property Law.
I currently lead a group looking at Smarter Working within the Defra group.
Defra group is made up of 30+ organisations, some that you will have heard of and
some that you may not.
Are you interested in Defra data and what Defra does?
I have worked in, with and around government data for 15 plus years and I thought
what I would do today is talk about how throughout my career I have used data to
help to change how people think and work to achieve environmental outcomes.
Which means we will be travelling in time somewhat.

2. Where it all started for me - well kind of. My journey in Government data started in
South Essex, wandering around landfill sites telling operators how to follow their
waste licences.
This job was a fascinating introduction in building consensus and developing
productive working relationships which has seen me well through the rest of my
career.
Turning up onto sites where people were doing things that were in explicit
contravention of their permit, such as burning rubbish on site but they were very
unlikely to listen to just being told what to do by a 20 something year old, with a van
and a clipboard. So I had to learn when it was worth trying to be firm and when to be
realistic and walk away.
Bear in mind that some of the sites had a reputation for having guns and definitely
some of them had very tough looking dogs.
It won’t surprise you to know that I didn’t stay too long doing this job, I moved
quickly to work in a team that was analysing the data that was submitted from these
kinds of sites, and the samples from the far more pleasant water courses that I had to
chuck buckets into.
This was my proper introduction to GIS and the power of geographical analysis, it
might sound bizarre but back when I started doing GI in this way we were not

3. routinely analysing the data from landfill sites on where it was emitting gas, despite
this information being provided. The data was just logged.
By beginning to analyse the data that was provided using GI, adding in a spatial
component as a regulator we could begin to look at where on the site we needed to
concentrate rather than trying to guess from wandering around.

4. In 2001 I moved to work for a national Environment Agency team, and I had the grand
title of Data Partnerships Manager and a brand new role (ie no one had done it
before). The idea was that we wanted to use our data as a bargaining chip to
reduce the charges others made on us to use their data.
I was tasked with developing a cost recovery model for data sharing with the public
sector that explicitly made no profit. This was an interesting challenge and I tackled it
by working with the British Geological Survey looking at the geology data we licensed
from them, and the costs associated with that against the data that they licensed from
us.
The model that we developed was necessarily complicated, in part because the
starting point was the price we wanted to charge - their price - and then this needed to
be allocated to the data that they wanted from us. So if they took a single dataset it
would cost the same as if they took 20. As you can imagine this was a slightly mad
concept, one of cost reduction rather than profit making and convincing them this was
a good idea took some time.
It was whilst doing this role that I first became involved in the world of flood data and
intellectual property rights, which (little did I know) would become a consistent
thread in my working life (as you will see). I can not remember how but it was at this
time, as a result of significant floods in 2000 that the Environment Agency was
looking to produce a significant update to its fluvial and coastal flood maps and for the
first time publish these on the internet so anyone could view them.

5. As a project this was huge, right at the edge of what was possible using quite
significant computing power (for the day). They were looking to produce a map like
the one shown here which is an ‘indicative’ flood plain map that is shows where the
water would go in the absence of flood defences etc (this is a deterministic model) .
But alongside this they were developing a new probabilistic model which looked at
the likelihood of flooding in any location in any given year.
The flood zone model was to be the first to be produced and was to be put onto the
internet in 2002, however the project had not considered a very important factor.
This was data being created using other people’s data as an input, amongst others
was data from a thing called the Flood Estimation Handbook which in effect
provides the water for any flood modelling in the UK.
This data was owned by CEH and previously they had used it to create a product
that looks much like this one. The Environment Agency project was not only using the
data from CEH in a way that they had not permitted (that is to create a map to be
published on the internet) on top of that the product would stop CEH being able to
sell their own flood product.
Not entirely unexpectedly (to me) they were not best pleased and their CEO got in
touch with our CEO and all manner of stuff hit the fan. The problem was actually
more complicated in the case of the probablistic model, because the data was
pushed through quite a complicated, and brand new, modelling process run by
contractors and no one had actually recorded how the data moved around the model.
As someone who had predicted the issue coming up, and being quite ‘confident’ I set
about trying to resolve the issue. The first task was to develop a detailed
understanding of how the data in question had been created, and recording that
in a manner which allowed non-modellers to talk with others, including lawyers, about
how the rights flowed within the products. This involved me persuading the flood
department to give me £150k to spend on unpicking all of their work and producing
what are now called ‘data flow maps’ for the products.
These flow maps became the basis of a lengthy and sometimes fractious
negotiation with CEH to ensure that the data could be used in the ways we wished.

6. Curiously perhaps, alongside the development of the cost recovery model for sharing
data within the quasi public sector, there was a strong push to develop revenue
streams alongside core business under a thing called the ‘Wider Markets Initiative’.
This was all about the public sector exploiting ‘spare irreducible capacity’ to reduce
pressure on the public purse. I am pretty sure (with little evidence) that when this was
thought up it was mainly around things like letting out meeting rooms, campsites in
woodlands (Forest Holidays) and sharing laboratories. However, it was also true
that there was this valuable asset, data, sitting around across the government some
of which would potentially be very interesting to 3rd parties for them to exploit.
As it happens, the Environment Agency had already been working with a couple of
commercial organisations in this way to get flood and other data into conveyancing
reports, but this had been pretty ad hoc. At this point, with a new whizzy flood
product coming along, there was an opportunity to renegotiate and develop more
robust commercial contracts to return royalties into the public sector coffers. Well, it
was an asset that could be exploited in line with the guidance.
As a result of this obvious opportunity, and the fact that the revenue from this activity
was getting significant (which means hitting the millions) the Environment Agency
embarked on a phase called ‘commercial development’ where resource was
invested in looking at where opportunities existed and how they could be exploited.
Simultaneously, this created an interesting complexity for the negotiations around

7. the data licences with CEH as they could see (rightly) a way that they could be
recompensed for their loss of market.
The problem was that there was very little understanding of how the data had been
created (outside the modelling community) how the licences worked (outside the
legal community) and what could be done about it all.

8. Some context, whilst I am now talking about 2007 (yes we still were not sorted with
CEH), this in the context of technology was the end of the dark ages. It was 2007 that
this man announced that we didn’t need physical keyboards on our mobile
telephones. The blackberry was a cool device, computers that did GI sat on desks
and didn’t move much (If at all).
We were still arguing about data formats, ESRI shapefile versus MapInfo tab files,
there was limited interoperability between computer programmes. Data was held (and
in some cases still is held) in huge archives built in oracle (or some other database
system) and was fantastic at holding it but a nightmare to extract it. [some may say
not much has changed]
The significance of this moment, as well as it being the moment that Apple really
became the dominant IT power, was that it began the journey of putting significant
computing power into our pockets. It started pocket GI through google maps being
viewable, and in my mind fundamentally changed the user base for our data.
Oh, and it flooded again in 2007 leading to quite a significant change in how flooding
was looked at and managed in England and Wales as the result of the Pitt review.
This recommended setting up the flood forecasting centre - a partnership between
the Environment Agency and the Met Office - which obviously meant that data
became even more of a commodity moving between organisations than before.

9. So, back to my story, 2007, the Commercial Development folks realised that if they
were to exploit stuff they needed to know what stuff they had. There was no register
in the Environment Agency (or anywhere else really) of the intangible assets that
were held (including data). A new term was thrown into the mix an Intellectual
Property Asset register, so this is a register of where significant copyright, database
right, design right, trade marks and patents were held.
This corresponded with me realising that what I had been doing with the flood data
flow mapping was tracking copyright and database rights through their
development.
I started talking the language of intellectual property but quickly started to feel that
blagging was going to (a) not get me very far with clever lawyers and (b) not give me
career longevity. So, I joined the commercial development function with a role of
helping educate the organisation on how to manage intellectual property and in order
to be able to do this I studied for an LLM in Intellectual Property Law.
This hiatus was incredibly rewarding as I left some of the data baggage behind and
started to get a better understanding of the organisation as a whole. Notably, I
developed an acute understanding of why most people didn't care about what I
did and that I needed to work hard to communicate with people in their language
using benefits to them as the hook to getting them to altering what they did.
I developed training courses for staff on intellectual property but never tried to train

10. people on © law. We just talked about the stuff they use to do their jobs.
The other observation, that holds true, is that experts seem to always over
complicate things to prove their expertise. For example, procurement processes
or HR processes are written from the perspective of me the expert demonstrating that
I am an expert and writing down all my knowledge rather than the point of view of you
as the non-expert just needing to know what you need to know.
Whilst this was fun, the rest of the commercial development function was not fairing
as well, there were opportunities to make increased revenue and there had been
some (small) successes but these were largely dwarfed by the now £5m income
from conveyancing which had required no real investment. So at this point, other than
data, after 3 years most of the commercial activities were stopped.
Ironically, I moved to lead the commercial data team, going back to where I had
started and guess what was still on the desk, yep the CEH negotiation nearly 9
years on…
But I had learned a lot since I was last involved, and when I reengaged i used some
of that learning to completely reframe the discussion. I set out a number of
principles:
(1) We value your intellectual property for what it brings to our products (therefore
tacit acceptance that according to their model we would have to pay
something).
(2) We want to publish our data derived from yours but not undermine your
business model.
(3) We will ensure that you get credit for the inputs to our products
(4) We will help you get the licensing framework right for us (and therefore the
myriad of others who use the data).
As a result of these principles being the bedrock of our discussions we finally made a
break through and got a contract in place for the wide sharing of flood data, including
the commercial resale, with agreements around upfront payments and royaties. This
was in 2013 and the revenue at this point had just hit £6m.

11. Then it flooded, winter 2013/14
In the Cabinet Office was Francis Maude who had a passion for open data, that is
data released from the public sector with the minimum of restrictions on use. This
picked up on the agenda that Gordon Brown (remember him) set in the last days of
the last Labour government where he made the Ordnance Survey (persuaded?)
release some open data products.
The Environment Agency had resisted this move, having discussions with the
government, luminaries from the open field like Sir Nigel Shadbolt and others, on the
basis that we needed to control who used the data because misuse of flood data
could create a risk to life. This argument held, until it flooded.
At this point there was a huge amount of pressure to make as much information on
flood available as open data in order to better communicate with the public. The
pressure came directly from Francis Maude onto the Environment Agency’s CEO. The
pressure was explicitly to release NaFRA (probabilistic) as open data. This had a
few significant consequences:
(1) It was pretty difficult to continue to resist the pressure to release, the press
and public perception outweighed the revenue, BUT
(2) NaFRA was by far the biggest revenue generator out of the 30 odd datasets
that were licensed commercially

12. (1) We had that commercial relationship with CEH respecting the value that their
data brought to our product
So all of a sudden we were in quite a tricky position, but the work done to recover
the situation with CEH meant that we had a much better working relationship so we
sat down together to work out what the situation meant.
We agreed that we would ask Cabinet Office for compensation for making NaFRA
Open Data - as a bridge as we were in year - and we would look to renegotiate our
relationship to respect those principles but recognise that the data publishing world
had changed significantly.
This requirement to change was obvious when sitting in a commercial data
licensing function, but what was seen elsewhere was the £££..

13. Which led directly to the set up of the Environment Agency Data Advisory Group.
Again, through my career, I had realised that it was very hard in the public sector to
get your voice heard past your manager - ie that is to speak the their boss, and
their bosses boss etc. So I found myself in the situation where I knew exactly what
was happening, and what would need to be done but it was difficult to get that voice
heard.
Which is when we developed the idea of EADAG, getting a cross section of our data
users, respected by and able to speak for their sectors to provide advice and steering
for our open data journey.
This was increasingly beneficial because
(1) by being open in our thinking we developed great relationships with people
who shared our belief that our data was valuable.
(2) We could communicate the difficulties in getting the organisation to change
tack and got support for what we were trying to do
(3) But maybe most importantly it got an Executive Director to sit down and listen
and talk about open data in a way which did not appear to be some upstart
jumping the hierarchy.
NaFRA was made open as a result of the flooding but the transition of the
Environment Agency to a fully open data organisation (in April 2018) was because the

14. EADAG provided that intervention into the senior management of the
organisation.

15. is.gd/LiDAR
The moment of change was probably the decision to make Lidar open. This was
where the knowledge and understanding of the EADAG provided a great impetus to
the opportunities of sharing this data and its potential applications across multiple
sectors came together with my ability to press the right buttons of those I was
talking with.
Making Lidar open was not born of pressure from the government, rather it was the
right thing to do to develop wider benefits, this was clear. But making it open meant
that the Environment Agency had to decide to give up £300k of revenue directly
associated with it.
The discussion at the Directors meeting was very much focussed on 2 things when
the paper was initially presented,
(1) that was why would we give up £300k and
(2) let someone like OS exploit and they could make money off our asset.
I intervened after this conversation had gone around a few times and made the point
that at that point significant Environment Agency resource was spent in every area
office (20+) checking flood risk assessments that were submitted by developers
(and others) when they wanted to develop within the flood plain. These FRAs may
suggest flood mitigation etc.
I suggested to the directors that if we made Lidar open we could save these staff

16. significant time on every FRA by insisting that our open Lidar data was used for
flood models rather than any inferior (and at that point cheaper) data. They
immediately saw the benefit and immediately signed off the decision.
It was directly as a result of this conversation that the 3 year transition of the
Environment Agency to an open data organisation and the giving up of the whole of
the £6m.
It also did for EADAG, as the purpose of the group had been served.

17. June 2015
At this point a rather interesting meeting occurred somewhere near silicon roundabout
- or whatever it is called, where our former SoS announced that Defra would release
8000 open datsets in a single year.
This was interesting for a number of reasons:
(1) at this point Defra had released about 800 open datasets
(2) No-one really new the announcement was coming so this was the classic
perfect storm.
The target was massive, and what was clear immediately was that all of the Defra
group members needed to be part of tackling the target - they would need to
contribute to the target. And the way that data had been published up until that point
would not work.
10

18. 42% of all the open data on data.gov.uk, which links to data made available by
UK government departments, comes from Defra group - with more than
12,000 open datasets on data.gov.uk from Defra.
We succeeded, but how?
In the past we shared data like it was hand made.
To meet the target we couldn't simply follow a slow and steady approach to
open data, we had to accelerate our publication which meant we had to take
more risks and push those who historically had been reluctant to share freely.
We asked the big data holding organisations in Defra to pledge the number of
datasets they will release as part of this pledge.
We hadn’t written down the processes end-to-end and we had to record these
and adapt as we are going along based on user feedback.
We had to work across the Defra group organisations helping each other to
deliver the pledges.
The intention of the challenge was to kick start a change of culture - getting
comfortable with working in the open
When we speak to most colleagues they agree with the principle of Open Data
and agree with some of the great uses and potential for maximising the reach
Defra published
10,146 open datasets
Over ⅓ of all data listed on data.gov.uk
#opendefra
June 2016

19. of our information.
The difficulty is when it comes to specific data sets – we find we revert back to
our traditional, risk averse way of thinking.

20. There are now a lot of open datasets, some more interesting than others - I always
maintained if 5% of the open data was used that would be a success - here are some
examples of data that is now open:
● Bathing Waters
● Seabed surveys
● Noise
● Great British Food Survey
● NaFRA
● Agricultural land classification
● River levels and
Since this finished the Environment Agency have released Water Quality Archive, and
are working on Hydrometric archive. RPA have released CHROME.
Some of these are available via APIs where the data is served out in a particular way,
some of these are simply downloads but all are open for re-use and hopefully as well
as wider economic benefits there will be some benefit to delivering Defra outcomes…
BUT

21. BUT - one of the things learned when doing commercial stuff is that publishing
the data is just the start, making the data available is fine but imagine if you
are a company like Tesco’s how would you know amongst the 13000 Defra
datasets there may be a few that are of significance to them.
For example, when dealing with the logistics of running a big store at what
point will the fact that this might happen be part of the thinking. This is
important to Defra because organisations like Tesco, Marks and Spencer,
Sainsbury's etc are community hub organisations where the messages of the
Environment Agency about being flood aware can be magnified. But in order
to play this role they need to understand why they should care, what is in it
for them.
So, alongside the open data release we have been developing an active
business engagement role, to sell the benefits of considering Defra data
alongside other data that may be held when developing contingency plans to
all risks.
For example it may be that a store is not at risk of this happening but what
about it’s supply lines and what about it’s customers. If major routes to a store
or depot are cut what impact could that have, what measures could Tesco et al
take to ensure that they are not too adversely effected?
21

22. In order to start to have this conversation the first step is to stop thinking that
just being experts is enough, we need to learn to talk the language of the
business we are trying to influence, we need to find out what they care about
and use those levers - with open data getting us through the door - to
persuade them to help themselves and us.

23. But it is not just about 121 dialogues, one of the other facts that Steve Jobs set in
motion is that we now all hold more computing power in our pockets than were on
the desktop when I started faffing with GIS.
This means that the community around data has grown. Data suppliers, users and
software developers are becoming more homogenous and beginning to work
together more to deliver insight and information that simply wasn't possible in the
past.
The problem that this creates is that organisations that regulate is that they need to
change how they think about the community and the benefits (such as different
insight) can be brought about by sharing both the data and the problems that we are
trying to solve and then listening when others have ideas.
This is a real change in culture because regulators are used to telling, so one of the
mechanisms I have tried has been running unconference events where the
representatives of data creators, users and software can come together to have open
conversations to try and develop a better sense of trust - which will then benefit all.
This is the real culture change that we are trying to get, one of openness as well as
open data and you are all part of this.

24. So why post it notes?
Well, they illustrate the change that I have seen over the past far too long from
secretive notebooks where we keep our stuff all locked up because we do not trust
people to not misuse it through to the culture of open where we write our notes on a
post it, stick it up on a wall for anyone to see and if we are really feeling open
photographing it and sharing it widely.

25. @MrMikeRose
Conclusion.
Data is valuable
Government not necessarily best place to exploit it
We need to influence those we wish to use it
We need to share our problems as well as our data
open by Design.

26. So, in no particular order, and apologies to those who I will have left out… here are
some people I would like to thank for my EA & Defra Journey:
David Price
Jamie Fairfull
Sarah (Fairfull) Paramour
Alan Martin
Jeff Matthews
Paul Davidson
Ken Bates
Greg Broughton
Liz Greenland
Stefan Carlyle
Estelle Palin
Adrian Nuttall
Sarah O’Grady
Matt Charnock
Clare Marsden
David Jones Robinson
Iain Laird
Martin Whitworth
Paul Wyse
Nic Giles
Chris Jarvis

27. Craig Elliott
Alex Coley
Emily Miles
Betsy Bassis
John Seglias
Clare Moriarty
David Buck
James Cattell
Stefan Janusz
Charlie Pattinson
Steve Killeen
Mike Rowley
Jason Vincent
Bradley Randall
Tash Bateman
And all the other people that I can't remember at this point...